Product Description

Product Description

Even as Angel mourns the death of Buffy, Darla makes her way to L.A. with a mysterious new life growing within her. Now thrust into a role he never imagined, Angel needs the assistance of the Angel Investigations team more than ever. But while Cordelia, Gunn and Fred rally round the new dad, an ancient and deadly prophecy convinces Wesley to commit the ultimate betrayal.

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In the third season of Angel, the titular vampire with a soul was forced to stand alone thanks to the (temporary) death of his beloved Buffy and her show's move to a new network, with no crossover between the two allowed. He returns from seeking peace in a demon-haunted monastery to find the L.A. Angel Investigations team fighting supernatural crime in his absence. Fred is still haunted by the nightmare dimension from which they rescued her; Cordelia's visions get ever more painful and debilitating. The schemes of the evil law firm Wolfram and Hart become every more imaginative and dragon lady Lilah Morgan becomes even more of an enemy when lusting after Angel. Unbelievably, Darla, Angel's vampire sire and lover, turns up, pregnant with his child and is tortured by inexplicable motherly feelings as well as a raging thirst for human blood.

For a few episodes things go pretty well--but Angel's enemies, both those he has made in his quest for redemption and those he made when he was unadulterated evil, are still out there. Stephanie Romanov comes into her silky own in this series, making Lilah Morgan all the more seductively evil because she is clear about the choices she has made; the satanic law firm of Wolfram and Hart are this show's most inspired creation. As the season moves to its close, Wesley (Alexis Denisof) has hard choices to make. The devastating climax is compulsive viewing, and this season also contains one of the most impressive single episodes of the entire show: in "Waiting in the Wings," writer, director and creator Joss Whedon comes up with a classic ghost story as Angel and his crew go to the ballet and find a performance that is literally timeless. --Roz Kaveney

Most helpful customer reviews

Angel Season Three was one of the best of the stellar show's five seasons. While it wasn't quite the best (wait for fall 2004 and the release of the season 4 DVD and you'll see what i mean), but it did mark the show's divergence from the shadow of its sister show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It also shifted the focus from the more stand-alone episodes of the previous two seasons to the more structured storyline that would continue into the excellent fourth season.The season opens with Heartthrob, an episode that has Angel dealing with the death of Buffy, as well as facing an old friend from his demonic past, who returns as an enemy out for vengeance against Angel for killing his lover. The episode finally allows Angel to put Buffy behind him and move on. The season's main arcs are introduced in the next few episodes, dealing with the worsening of Cordelia's visions, the deepening feelings of Cordelia and Angel for one another, Darla's pregnancy with Angel's son (a birth by two vampires, an unprecedented event), the Wesley-Fred-Gunn love triangle, and the reappearance of the 18th century vampire hunter Daniel Holtz, who makes a pact with the demon Sahjhan to return in the 21st century to avenge his family, who Angel brutally murdered before being re-ensouled.The season is incredibly well-written, showing Angel coming to terms with fatherhood and growing to deeply love his son. It shows Wesley sinking slowly into darkness as he is forced to betray Angel in an effort to do the right thing. It shows Lilah Morgan of Wolfram and Hart finally begin to show glimpses of inner conflict. And it shows Holtz, a potrait of a man consumed by hatred, with nothing left but a thirst for vengeance which he will do anything to satisfy.Read more ›

What I admire about Angel the Series is that each year (until recently) the show has expanded and delved into more complex and darker territory. Season 1 was a basic introduction to Angel (and his constant struggle to find his place in the world), Season 2 dealt with the effects of depression and hopelessness, and Season 3 was the most ambitious yet as it shifted from being a show focused on friendships and became a show about family. It's not just that the writers decided to give Angel a son, they were also smart to realize that by this point Angel and his group of heroes had become a tight-knit family of their own - with a real family's dysfunction, love, and pain.However, Season 3 is ultimately about Angel's son, Connor, and the responses he inspires in the main characters. From the moment Darla (Angel's former vampire lover) shows up, impossibly pregnant, the reality of Angel's offspring is treated with skepticism, horror, joy, and fear. Will his son be a vampire? Or some other sort of abomination? Well, he turns out to be just a normal baby, who unfortunately inspires all of Angel's friends and enemies to imagine many sorts of outcomes for little Connor which lead to betrayal and heartbreak.S3 is uneven (there a few episodes I can cheerfully never see again), but taken as a whole, it fits together nicely. Many people were annoyed by the addition of baby Connor (myself included) but by the time I realized that Angel's son was on the fast track to becoming the most screwed-up character in the Buffyverse (and that's saying something) I quickly started to like him. (Casting the wonderful Vincent Kartheiser to play the teenage version of Connor also helped.Read more ›

Just like the show it was spun off from, Angel achieved greatness in it's third season. Beginning with Angel (David Boreanaz) mourning the death of his former lover Buffy, the vampire with a soul finds his old love Darla (Julie Benz) pregnant with his child, while the evil law firm of Wolfram & Hart begins to dismantle everything that Angel and his crew have built around them. Evil seductress Lilah Morgan (Stephanie Romanov) has her own plans as well, and Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) faces a destiny that she, nor viewers who have watched her since she was on Buffy, would have never expected. As the season comes to a close, the love triangle between Wesley (Alexis Denisof), Fred (Amy Acker), and Gunn (J. August Richards) explodes, and the super cliffhanger season finale has to be seen to be believed. The cast of Angel excels in this season more than ever (I firmly believe that this is the best season of Angel) and the casting of Vincent Kartheiser as Angel's estranged son Connor is perfect. Andy Hallet is plain loveable as the green skinned, karaoke loving demon Lorne, and Boreanaz is at his brooding best. All in all, season 3 of Angel saw the show step out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer's shadow and stand on it's own as one of the best prime time TV dramas on the air.

Warning: Lots of spoilers.Season Three of Angel remains, in many ways, my favorite of the show's run. The shows are persistently good, but if I had to put my finger on a specific reason I like it so much, it is that the cast meshes together perfectly. By the end of the season, there would be major--at the time seemingly impossible to mend--rifts between some of the members of Angel Investigations, but the core group was the best to date. Angel, restored to the group as their spiritual if not technical leader, has recovered his sense of purpose. Cordy (whose presence is missed mightily in the Fifth Season--I hope she and Joss Whedon patch up their differences and work her back into the show where she belongs--Note: their differences, apart from the official rhetoric, apparently revolving around her leaving the show for a few episodes near the end of this season, and her delayed announcement of her real-life pregnancy in Season Four, causing significantly rewriting--my gut feeling is that she will be back after a period of "punishment") has completely accepted her role as the contact to the Powers That Be, and both works hard at becoming a more important member of the team and manages to work a compromise to deal with the extraordinary physical toll the visions are taking on her (by becoming part demon--a gigantic step that one could hardly imagine the Cordelia of the first three years of Buffy making). Wesley and Gunn are both taken by the new resident of Hotel Angel, Winifred aka Fred, the scientifically brilliant but psychologically traumatized young woman they had rescued from Pylea. And finally, Lorne, formerly known as The Host, moves in when his karaoke bar has to close. It is a great group, and the interaction between all of them is extraordinary. And the romance!Read more ›